Prison reform: reflections of an inmate who turned her life around

But there was no violence and prisoners came to introduce themselves. ‘‘They were very protective of me. We were in a big concrete cell and I realised I was one of them.’’

She was (usually) a compliant prisoner and staff responded well. But she saw tit-for-tat feuds - prisoners who picked fights and staff who withheld essentials in a cyclic power struggle.

Tucker - or prisoner 171435 - was a cleanskin. She had not committed a crime of passion nor was she addicted to drugs. She had no real history with police and as a result she is able to give a unique insider’s view of our prison system.

She is a success story, rebuilding her life, using her time inside to study, graduating with a master’s degree and later gaining a PhD. ‘‘Prison made me a better person,’’ she says.

Too often the reverse is true.

These days Tucker is an author (The Prisoner, Penguin Books), lecturer and student mentor. She learnt much in her time in jail, and not just from studies. She saw first-hand how the system is failing and believes we are heading down a path to penal disaster.

In April 1999 Victoria had 182 female prisoners - 142 sentenced and 40 on remand. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 602 - 309 sentenced and 293 on remand.

‘‘It is a sad reflection on our society that all we can do is build more prisons. I am not anti-prison. There are many who need to be there but 30 to 40 per cent should not.’’

So why the jump? Drugs are the major problem but non-violent females are being kept in prison because of a violent crime against a woman. When in 2012 Adrian Ernest Bayley murdered Jill Meagher as she walked home in Brunswick, he was on parole that should have been revoked due to an earlier vicious assault. The truth is the murder was entirely avoidable and as a result parole was tightened and the prison population grew.

Ice is an epidemic and is clogging courts, prisons and casualty wards. Recently Tucker went out to Deer Park, where she spent years at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a maximum security women’s prison. Next door is the giant Ravenhall Prison and the Melbourne Remand Centre. ‘‘I was shocked. It was this enormous futuristic city - a sea of walls.’’

Then there are the small custodial sentences, often issued out of exasperation. ‘‘They can get three months for failure to appear and multiple shoplifting charges. They can lose their homes, jobs and kids. They come out worse and more likely to reoffend,’’ she says.

She argues the merits of home detention. ‘‘You can work, care for kids and still be punished. Home detention costs about $8000. It costs $90,000 a year to keep someone like me in prison. Why punish the kids?’’

Ravenhall is more than 15 times the size of the MCG, has around 1000 security cameras and a giant exterior wall running for more than 1.6 kilometres.

Opened in 2017 as Victoria’s biggest prison, able to house 1000 inmates, it is already being extended to accommodate 1600. Another major prison housing 1300 inmates will be built near Geelong.

The Frost centre has been rebuilt with US style multi-level divisions rather than the traditional cottage accommodation - the wire fence has been replaced by a wall, despite there being no escape problem. Tucker says this reinforces the feeling that you are not part of the community.

The statistics on female inmates make grim reading with 37 per cent returning to prison, 18 per cent under 25 years of age, 69 per cent mothers, 61 per cent regular drug users and 65 per cent family violence victims.

Tucker says that in one year on release six former inmates were murdered by partners and a further 11 died of drug overdoses. ‘‘It is an indictment that many of the family violence victims feel safer in prison than on the outside and they walk back out into violent relationships because that’s all they know. We should be preparing them for release from the day they arrive.’’

She believes teaching and counselling services should tackle sexual assault, family violence and substance abuse as well as cooking (many don’t know how to cook a healthy meal), parenting and basic life skills. "If they don’t complete the course they don’t get parole," she says. ‘‘You want them to better when they come out than when they went in.’’

She says some of the long-held prison practices make inmates worse and lead to increased tension inside, such as spending hours a day untangling the easily-knotted wires on air passengers’ headsets before cleaning them for reuse. ''They shouldn’t have to do that. You go to prison as punishment, not for punishment.’’

While she admits that before her jail stint she had a rocket-fuelled temper, she was never violent, but the frustration of the mind-numbing routine led her to fail anger management four times. The last time she told the supervisor: ‘‘If you don’t pass me I’ll punch you in the head.’’ Unsurprisingly she failed.

A depressing number of released inmates reoffend and return within a year. "The hardest part of prison is leaving it. You become immersed into that [prison] community because no one wants you. I said there was no way I would be institutionalised but I found [on release] that for the first 12 months outside I would look at my watch every day to see what time was muster,’’ she says.

Tucker was housed with several killers, those who murdered abusive partners. She found those convicted of conspiracy to murder were masters of manipulation, often persuading fellow inmates to do their bidding inside.

Even though she had brand-new qualifications, no drug issues, was not in a violent relationship and had job opportunities, the outside world was daunting. On the outside life moves on. On the inside the days can be all the same. "It took six to seven years to re-bond with my children. They didn’t want to live with me and that was like a kick in the guts. They are law-abiding beautiful young women,’’ she says.

Kerry Tucker committed serious crime with real victims. She betrayed the trust of friends and colleagues with a series of offences that simply had to be discovered. But she did her time and is working hard to try and improve the system that imprisoned her.

So much time and resources are wasted taking prisoners to courts for procedural hearings, she says. Wouldn’t it be better to take the magistrate to prison to hear the lot in one session?

Instead of mindless work she wants nine-to-five study, training and counselling. No one is going be rehabilitated untangling headphones.

‘‘There are so many ways we can streamline the system without pandering to prisoners.’’

Kerry Tucker will be a keynote speaker at the International Criminal Justice Conference to be held at the MCG on November 21/22.